SAP BI and SAP BW are the same solution ? Let’s try to answer this question. First, we will define what’s SAP BW is a couple of sentense.
Then let’s check the difference between SAP BW and SAP BI.
Finally, let’s answer an other question about the difference between SAP BW and SAP BO.
Table of Contents
What is SAP BW ?
“SAP Business Warehouse (abridge SAP BW) is SAP’s Enterprise Data Warehouse product. It can transform and consolidate business information from virtually any source system.
It ran on industry standard RDBMS until version 7.3 at which point it began to transition onto SAP’s HANA in-memory DBMS, particularly with the release of version 7.4.
In 1998 SAP released the first version SAP BW providing a model-driven approach to EDW which made data warehousing easier and more efficient, particularly for SAP R/3 data.
Since then SAP BW has evolved to become a key component for tens of thousands of companies ” (source)
Read also List Of The Most Important SAP BW Tables.
Difference between SAP BI and SAP BW ?
The only difference between SAP BI and SAP BW is the name. Actually, SAP BI and SAP BW are the same thing.
SAP made changing to the name of the business warehouse solution.
If you want to check the details about Overview of SAP History and BW-BI Evolution.
Some Gloassay is need indeed:
- BIW->Business Warehouse Information System
- BW -> Business Warehouse
- BI -> Business Intelligence.
Actually, up to 2008, SAP used the term “Business Intelligence” to refer both SAP BusinessObjects BI solutions and SAP NetWeaver BI.
Sometimes it leads customers to confusion.
So, SAP BI (SAP Netweaver Business Intelligence) is no longer used and 3 others terms are born:
- SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse (BW)
- SAP Business Explorer (BEx)
- and SAP NetWeaver BW Accelerator (BWA)
Difference Between SAP SAP BW and SAP BO ?
“Business Warehousing is collecting enterprise data from different source systems where as Business Objects is reporting enterprise data.
BW Example: An enterprise operating in different regions of a country and each of them have different databases. Again these databases may be of same vendor or different vendors.
Their structure and nomenclature again may be different. But, managers would like to see and analyse the business at country level. Then, we need to combine the data in a meaningful way for analyzing purpose.
BO Example: An enterprise is using a business application to perform it’s business. When users of that application enter data into that application and data gets generated.
For analyzing this data, we need Business Objects. Using BO, we make Web Intelligence reports, Dash boards etc. These reports can also be scheduled to be sent to managers.
They are totally different tools, but related tools. Relation is that Business Objects may be used as next step of Business Warehousing.
SAP BO package contains different products in it, like Web Intelligence, Universe Design Tool etc.”
